


Tune as Old as Song

by pabbeyrene



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Marriage Proposal, Marriage of Convenience, Married Couple, One Shot, Victorian Attitudes, Wedding Night, basically just making yharnam as victorian as i possibly can, slight aromatic whiffs of freudian bullshit, uh. there's sex in here? not super explicit but not fade-to-black either
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-20 07:13:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13141674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pabbeyrene/pseuds/pabbeyrene
Summary: Once there was a hunter named Gascoigne, and there was a woman named Viola. They met, and then they married, and then they fell in love.It didn't end well.





	Tune as Old as Song

**Author's Note:**

> This is not what I was supposed to be working on. But sometimes you're jet-lagged and wide awake at three o'clock on Christmas morning and you're like ... what's up with Viola, though? Like, what's her deal? And then this happens.

It was not a marriage of convenience. Viola was quite insistent upon that, if only in her own mind: she was old enough for worry, admittedly, but not yet for panic – as she had often reminded her friend Lida, who was of a similar age, and similarly unwed. And even as a younger woman she had felt quite strongly that, even if she would not _insist_ upon marrying for love, she would never marry simply for the sake of marrying. Her parents had money enough to support her if she never found a match. To be a maiden aunt was not perhaps a desirable fate, but neither did it seem to Viola to be quite as dreadful as some made it out to be – and certainly preferable to some of the alternatives.

So when the foreigner Gascoigne began to pay her some attention, she would not pretend that she was an _entirely_ disinterested party, nor that he was the sort of man most young ladies would entertain if they had other prospects. But she had always had slightly unusual tastes, in any case – and the main point was that even if she could not claim that she acted out of the overflowing feelings of a newly-awakened heart, she certainly was not acting out of desperation, either.

It was her father who introduced them. He was a man who had always lived comfortably but had recently, through clever dealing and a bit of good fortune, found himself something close to rich. It pleased him now to play the patron, inviting promising young hopefuls from throughout Yharnam’s ranks to his home, cultivating their acquaintance and lending them a bit of assistance when they were deemed particularly worthy. Gascoigne had come to his attention through his connections in the Church, and had been invited first to a series of dinner parties and later to more intimate family gatherings.

Gascoigne was foreign, which was one strike against him already in Yharnam’s eyes; and he was older, dark hair already beginning to be shot with gray. His manners were decent enough, and he never gave cause for offense, but there was something a bit rough about him nonetheless: there was cause to doubt his background, at the very least, and he never volunteered enough information about himself to dispel these suspicions. And he was simply enormous. That was no fault of his own, of course, and Viola wasn’t sure she could even call it a mark against him. (There was something fascinating about it – his sheer mass drew they eye like a planet drew its satellites.) But it was certainly yet another oddity about the man.

Still: oddities had their appeal, especially when they took an interest in you in a way no man ever had before. After supper her father would often invite Gascoigne to read them a passage or two from the scriptures. Viola had never been quite as pious as her mother would have liked, but when this foreign priest began to read, in his low voice and strange accent, her eyes never left him. Gascoigne had an intense gaze, a consuming gaze, that focused entirely on one thing as though it needed to polish it off completely before it could fix its attentions elsewhere. So when that powerful gaze left the holy book it was intent on for just a moment, to glance surreptitiously towards where she sat by the fire – only to meet her own focused eyes and dart quickly downwards again – it always sent just a little bit of a thrill down Viola’s spine.

He had no ring when he proposed. When he reached into his pocket, something that might have been consternation briefly flashed across his face, and Viola wondered if he had realized that he’d forgotten something rather important. (Not that he had made any offer just yet – but you didn’t have to be a Byrgenwerth scholar to understand the significance of an eligible man looking suddenly nervous when inviting an eligible woman to walk alone with him in the garden.) But if it had indeed occurred to him that he was meant to offer a different sort of gift at this particular juncture, he did not acknowledge it. Instead he just held out what he had brought her: a little box, prettily carved.

She opened the lid, curious, and saw the mechanism inside.

It played a song, he explained gruffly – the same song that she had played for them on the piano the first night he came to her house. He had asked all around, to find out what it was.

It was an old Yharnam melody, in point of fact, one of which she’d always been fond. As she turned the key to wind the box, there was a single question in her mind: had he gone around the city humming that tune in his deep thunder-voice, to anyone who would listen, just to find its name?

She released the key: the mechanism whirred softly, and the tune began to play. She stood there listening to it, head cocked and eyes lowered, until it had played through once in its entirety. Then she looked up at him. It was a bit of unintentional cruelty, to have made him wait there nervously while she stood in silence. But she felt that something had been sealed between them now. He had said the music box would play a certain tune, and she had confirmed that indeed it did.

A promise made and kept.

* * *

The nightgown that Viola wore on her wedding night was new, made of silk that did not warm her but that clung to her body and teasingly suggested her shape. She felt half a stranger to her own form. The curves and lines of her body seemed very different tonight than they had all the countless times she had looked down on them before; and feeling Gascoigne’s eyes on her she felt half-tempted to say deliriously: No, excuse me, there must be some mistake – don’t think that this is what you should expect from me; I’m not quite myself this evening.

She met his eyes. They were sitting close together on the bed, both of her hands resting lightly in one of his own. With the other he reached out to brush her loose hair just next to her temple. She wasn’t so naïve as to think she could read what he was thinking, this man who was in so many ways still a stranger to her. Still, intense as it was, she saw nothing to be frightened of in his gaze: yet still she shivered just slightly, and her flesh was goose-pimples all over.

Viola knew what a man’s body looked like. She wasn’t so much a blushing innocent as all that. She had brothers, and they had bathed together when they were very small. Besides, Lida’s father was a doctor of the Church, and when they were girls just on the verge of womanhood she had smuggled over a medical text of his that had some very interesting illustrations. And they had gone together to the exhibits of Pthumerian statuary sometimes hosted in Cathedral Ward: the Pthumerians were not quite human, the scholars generally agreed, but they seemed to have the same basic pieces in the same basic places. And though the girls were old enough by then to know to conceal their interest in such things, they had both lingered by certain statues, and they had both known why.

So when Gascoigne finally undressed, Viola felt a sort of mild interest more than anything, a scientist’s curiosity at seeing theory put into practice. There was quite a bit more hair than she had been led to believe, but otherwise she could hardly call herself shocked. She looked him up and down, and then began to feel a bit badly for him, that he was standing there exposed and vulnerable and she was just sitting there silent. So she sat up on her knees and lifted her nightgown over her head. That seemed fair.

When he touched her, bare skin on bare skin, it was _warm:_ she shivered slightly but pulled him closer, grateful for the heat. He began to kiss all down the side of her cheek, her jaw, her throat: the scratch of his beard on her exposed skin thrilled her even more than the press of his mouth, and she pulled him closer still.

They didn’t talk much. He was careful – not tentative, but slow: he gave her time to pull away or tell him to stop, whenever his hands roamed somewhere new. But she never did. She let her silence, and gentle pressure from her own hands, speak for her. She made sounds only when his hands slid lower still, to a place her own fingers had touched only briefly before, when she woke up in the middle of the night with a throbbing between her legs. She had been too timid to explore on those nights when she lay alone in her room: her fingers had fluttered down and then pulled sharply away. But she guided him now, learning along with him, responding with little gasps and tightenings of her fingers and bucks of her hips, and finally with _Yes, yes, yes._

It did hurt, when he finally got around to it. She knew what to expect, and it wasn’t quite so bad as she had feared: but, to put it bluntly, he was _big._ She breathed deeply, and tried to relax as her mother had told her; and it was certainly _interesting,_ this new sensation, so much that she could almost distract herself her own curious observations. Gascoigne was slow, gentle, careful: but he didn’t apologize, didn’t treat her as if she might shatter, for which Viola was grateful. She’d been coddled enough by her parents. She wanted her husband to treat her as a wife, not as a child.

They lay together for some time afterwards, her arms around him, his face buried in her neck. After some time she began to stroke his hair, which felt curiously more intimate and daring than anything that had come before. Before she drifted off to sleep, Viola reached out lazily with one arm to wind the music box, which rested on the bedside stand. It was pleasant to lie like this, warm, with the soft tinkling notes drifting over them. Viola had decided that so far, it was fair to say that all this was certainly preferable to being an old maid.

* * *

Gascoigne had interesting friends. Viola hadn’t known many hunters before she knew him: her father had generally preferred hosting artists and scholars. But now she was surrounded by them, testing her skills as a housekeeper on these rough and often intimidating men and women. Not that they were unkind: Viola just felt so very small next to them, pale and soft and silly. She thirsted to prove herself, to show herself as clever and sharp as she knew she could be, but she couldn’t imagine how. To her frustration she found that she often dismissed herself before they got the chance to, sidling out of the room or keeping resolutely silent during dinner-table discussions.

The old hunter Henryk was Gascoigne’s particular friend, of course; Gascoigne had introduced them before they married. His visits were nerve-wracking in the extreme. When her husband was near Henryk was sociable enough: the two spoke with the ease of long years of friendship, and sometimes fairly roared with laughter. But when Gascoigne wasn’t present – which was often, and, Viola suspected, by design, as he so badly wanted the two of them to become friends – conversation petered out into an agonizing silence in which time itself seemed to slow. The gentle _clink_ of removing and replacing a teacup in its saucer became so deafening that Viola often just sat with her hands in her lap and prayed for it to be over.

Her husband often returned to this strained silence, and she imagined he was disappointed; but one evening, several months after their marriage, and mere minutes after the conclusion of Henryk’s last disastrous call, she realized that he seemed more amused than anything. In response to her timid apology, he just smiled and shook his head, and remarked that they were _just too similar._ Simple enough, but it was a moment of revelation for Viola: the next time Henryk came to call, she changed her battle strategy entirely. She poured him his tea, asked a few polite questions, received a few polite answers, and then sat, as always: but rather than sitting in rigid awkward silence, she relaxed, she breathed; sipped her tea as she pleased, thumbed through a novel, watched the leaves float past the parlor window, and gave Henryk a warm and relaxed smile whenever their eyes met. It was like magic: he relaxed too, and sat in peaceful meditation. The silence between them now steeped pleasantly, and when Gascoigne returned the two of them were sitting quite companionably, and enjoying the quiet.

Everything became a bit easier after that. Viola relaxed in company, stopped holding herself so rigidly; conversation came more easily, and so did friendship. They _were_ interesting, these friends of her husband’s. When they were no longer so frightened of her ( _them,_ frightened of _her_ – but yes, she realized now, that had been half the trouble) she drank in their stories eagerly. She had half a mind to pick up a pen and start jotting them down, assemble them into some sort of narrative or collection. The hunters, for their part, started only half-teasingly suggesting she might like to pick up a blade or rifle instead, and start learning their craft.

Joking aside, Gascoigne did begin to teach her how to fire a gun. It was a useful skill to have in Yharnam. Most hunters weren’t married, but those that were always made sure their wives were ready to defend themselves. (Or their husbands – it certainly wasn’t unheard of for women to hunt, as the guest list of Viola’s own dinner parties clearly showed; but these women tended not to come from families of such means as Viola’s own.) Viola’s brothers weren’t hunters, but she’d caught them in the garden giving lessons to the young ladies they were courting: the process generally seemed to involve more hands-on correction than entirely necessary, not to mention more giggling on the part of their paramours.

There was none of that with Gascoigne. He wasn’t shy to adjust her grip or her aim; he was patient and encouraging, and gave her praise when she’d earned it. But that was all. He was there to teach, and she was there to learn. Other activities were reserved for other times and places. And Viola liked that. And she liked him.

* * *

The first child took its sweet time to come into the world. Viola was never in danger: the vials of sacred blood remained sealed in the doctor’s case. But the labor was long, and painful. Silly to say painful – redundant, and pointless. Every labor was painful, and everybody knew it. But still. What Viola hated most, when she had mind enough to hate anything, was the helplessness: waves of fiery agony shooting through her, and nothing she could do to relieve it, nothing she could do at all but scream and push.

When the child finally tore free, and the midwife proclaimed it a girl, and held it up for her to see, Viola waited to feel the rush of overwhelming maternal love she’d been promised. That was what her mother had said – her aunts and sisters-in-law too – that when you saw your baby, held her for the first time, you’d be nearly drowned in powerful feeling. But looking at the child, Viola could only think blearily: Oh, is that mine? Is it part of me? Was it inside me, just minutes ago? It’s very yellow and wrinkled, and covered in unpleasant things.

She imagined her husband would be disappointed. Perhaps only a little bit: he’d been so excited for the child, for any child; when she had told him his look of gentle dawning joy had almost moved her to tears herself, and he’d spent the last months in a state of glowing contentment. They’d never spoken about the child’s potential sex: but husbands wanted sons, as a general principle, or so Viola understood.

But the moment Gascoigne saw the child, he would not be separated from her. While Viola recovered, he did everything but nurse her, and Viola thought he’d have done that too if he were able. He didn’t like to leave Viola for long, either, and so the three of them were together in that room for many nights. She slept a great deal, and often woke late at night to the sound of him crooning something sing-song and senseless to the child, and the dim shadowy sight of him curled up around her, the infant dwarfed but secure in his enormous arms.

Viola’s recovery was slow but steady. What plagued her more than any lingering physical weakness was that the rush of maternal feeling still would not come: it brought her something close to panic, at times, when she was holding the child and felt nothing but the sort of mild interest she might take in any passing stranger. She thought of asking her mother about it, but shame restrained her; once she even surreptitiously took a bit of blood – even though new mothers were generally told not to, as its effects could be unpredictable – but though it had her quickly up and walking again, her feelings for the baby remained tepidly cordial.

Seeing her husband _with_ the baby, though – that stirred her; and it certainly happened often enough. Even when Viola was again capable of tending to all the daily household tasks, he still stayed close to their daughter whenever he could. And seeing the way his face shone, the way he cradled her close – his expression, when he felt her watching, and looked up at her – then she would feel a surge of _something_ , and would often draw close and join them.

The child was healthy and strong. One day her eyes suddenly seemed to focus for the first time, and trained very seriously and intently on Viola’s face: Viola stared back, fascinated. And then later she began to smile – and to laugh – to wave her arms and feet more vigorously, to hold her head up, to try clumsily to drag herself across the carpet – it was extraordinary; Viola again felt an urge to seize a pen and record everything. As if their child was the only one in the world to ever learn to sit upright, or to grasp her own feet! Silly, silly, but Viola was enchanted nonetheless. She eagerly relayed to Gascoigne everything their daughter learned, and he provided his own reports with no less interest, when she had been out of the house for a day or an hour. And one day, at last, she looked down at her child in her arms and realized that she felt very much as a mother should. Excuse me, she wanted to say, as tears of relief pricked her eyes: forgive me if I was a bit cold, early in our acquaintance; it’s only that I needed to get to know you first – I don’t fling my affections about willy-nilly, you see.

Their second daughter came more easily into the world, and so too did Viola’s love for her. It still wasn’t easy, or quick: but easier and quicker, and that was good enough for now.

* * *

The streets of Yharnam were growing ever more troubled. They put more locks on the doors, installed bars over the windows, as did all the other families nearby. Gascoigne hunted less frequently than he used to, and would have liked to retire altogether – but her husband was skilled and strong, and the city had need of him and Henryk. Meanwhile, the Church urged all the good wives of Yharnam to make their households strong against the scourge: be pious and upright, support the noble hunters, and of course donate generously during collection time.

Well, Viola thought that she donated quite enough already, what with her husband heaving off at all hours of the night with his axe strapped to his back, and returning covered in blood and reeking of beast. But she fortified her home nonetheless, as well as she knew how. They said a man’s home was his castle: well, Viola wielded her embroidery like a defiant banner, her knitting-needles like twin lances, her scalding laundry water like pots of boiling oil. She ordered the servants about as efficiently and stridently as any commander ordered his men. The world without was dark and mysterious and more threatening all the time: but within her walls, Viola felt that if she could maintain order and neatness against all odds, she could create a bastion of normalcy that the scourge could never penetrate.

Their daughters were pretty and precocious, the cleverest children in Yharnam as far as Viola was concerned. They lived well, never wanted for anything, were safe and cherished. One night, as Viola passed the parlor, she heard the gentle chimes of the music box. She looked in and saw the older girl pestering her father, half-climbing him, play-slapping his face with her little hands. Gascoigne was pinned down by the younger girl, who had fallen asleep in his arms. He teasingly caught her hand in his mouth, threatened to bite it. Viola had seen the same sort of thing dozens of times, hundreds perhaps: but that night she watched them for a full minute, and realized she was happy.

* * *

The music box saved her life, but only by accident.

It tended to travel around the house. Its rightful place was in the parlor, but the girls liked to play with it, and she liked to have it sometimes as she dealt with particularly frustrating chores, and Gascoigne often liked to listen to it before bed. It was only by chance that on that night it happened to be in the dining room, and happened to still be slightly wound. Because when something that looked like her husband stalked into the room, and would not answer her, and would not meet her eyes, and bared his teeth and lunged – Viola leapt backwards, and he crashed into the table and jarred the box, and it emitted a few weak tinkling notes of protest.

Gascoigne froze. Viola was pressed back against the mantelpiece, her heartbeat stuttering wildly. Gascoigne shook his head stupidly, like a horse trying to shake an irritating fly, and staggered. But he gathered himself – his shoulders hunched, teeth bared – and looked at her. And what she saw in his eyes sent such a shock of pure terror all down her spine that it jostled loose a few simple thoughts: Gascoigne had tried to attack her. The notes from the box had stopped him. Clearly, then, she must make the box play again.

She lunged at the same time as he did – she got her hands around the box, he crashed over the table – she fell to the floor trying to avoid him, wrenching the key so hard it was a miracle it didn’t break. A few more notes rang out – Gascoigne staggered again – she wound the box frantically, let it play, wound it, let it play. Gascoigne was clutching his head now, and moaning as if in pain. Wind, play, wind, play. He sank to his knees. Wind. Play. Wind.

Viola climbed slowly to her feet. Her breathing was loud in her own ears, dry papery rasps. She held the music box out in front of her, but her husband didn’t stir – only hunched lower, his shoulders starting to shake. Whatever _thing_ had possessed him seemed to have passed – though he didn’t look at her, she could sense that he was aware of her presence, aware of what had happened. Aware of what it meant.

And Viola realized for the first time, staring down at him now, that she loved him. She loved him: and not with a peaceable, content, workaday love. Not with the gentle inevitable affection that arises from a life spent quietly living and working in each other’s company. She loved him powerfully and intensely. She loved him like thunder clouds brooding and lightning flashing. She loved him like the earth-shaking peal of the Grand Cathedral’s bell. And like waves crashing on shore, and a great wind shaking the boughs of an ancient forest, and all those flowery potent metaphors that she’d read in poetry-books and never understood or cared for. She loved him, loved him, loved him. And it made her want to go to him, wrap her arms around him, lay his great shaggy head on her breast and weep along with him.

But there were more things in life than love. Her children were sleeping upstairs, and there might still be servants down below. And somehow this scourge, this plague, this creeping insidious _rot,_ had found a crack in her armor and had infiltrated her fortress. And so she did not hold him, and she did not weep. She looked down at the music box in her hands. She had never heard of anything that could still a beast once they began to turn, much less turn them _back_. That was interesting. That offered a shred of hope. She needn’t to go to the Church just yet.

She held the music box tightly as she sidled around him. She wanted to touch his head, his shoulder, but she did not. She told him that she was going to check on the girls, and that is what she did.

* * *

It was the music box that started it and the music box that ended it. The music box saved her, until it didn’t. Throughout her husband’s decline, it continued to give her hope: however far it seemed he went over the precipice, that melody could always drag him back. It made her complacent, and foolish. She should have gone to the Black Church Hunters the first time, the second time, the fifth – or gone to Henryk, at least; he would have known what to do. Or even if he hadn’t, he should have known. She should not have kept it from him, for his sake and for theirs.

On that morning, as she watched the purple dawn bleed away into clear blue sky, she knew that she should do nothing. Her husband had not returned. That led to a series of self-evident conclusions, the most obvious and relevant being that the situation was now out of Viola’s power. She was abed, with her girls curled up around her – she had always liked to keep them close on nights of the hunt, and now more than ever – and her duty was clear. Her husband was gone, her children were not.

But still she hoped. Still she waited. Just in case. And she kept the music box close, even though as the hours wore away, and her daughters became more and more concerned about the whereabouts of their father, it seemed to take on something of an accusatory air. She wound it automatically, to still her nerves, and then stood there frozen until it played out, bound as if by a curse out of some old storybook.

She sent word to Henryk. He did not respond. The servant said his house was empty. She sent word to everyone she could think of – which was not many; the hunters’ numbers had dwindled since those long-ago dinner parties. No one was home, no one could answer. She haunted the windows of her home, standing for hours with arms folded and her gaze distant, rigid and unfeeling as a statue. A day bled into another, and the city prepared for another hunt (so soon, so soon – they would be nightly before long, she imagined). She watched the pale morning light deepen into gold, only noticing the tears on her face when the cold drafts made them prick her cheeks like tiny needles. And through it all she heard the music box’s tune in her head. Strange, but she’d never noticed before how eerie it was. The unsettling minor chords took on a life of their own in her mind, not the airy little notes of the music box but richer, deeper, piano and cello and organ; phrases blurred into one another, looped over and over again.

When she finally left, it was in a blur of motion, swift orders to servants and stern instructions to the girls drowning out any more rational thought. She gathered her cloak tight around her, held the pistol loaded and ready in her hand. There was time before night truly fell. She would go to Henryk’s house, perhaps walk as far as the Ward, just to see. Just to see.

Henryk’s house was indeed empty. There was no one about who could tell her where he’d gone. She knocked on the doors of a few other hunters – no one she knew well, or trusted much, but in response to her guarded questions they revealed when and where they’d last seen Gascoigne. She followed their leads, watching the light drain away, dusk returning to reclaim its city: just a little farther, just a little farther.

In the end it wasn’t difficult to find him. The hunters’ leads and her own instinct led her deep into the Ward, and she sensed him before she saw him. He was hunched and feral, swathed in bruised purple shadows: he crouched over murky and motionless human forms that she deliberately ignored. Time enough for that later, when he was home and safe. She called his name, her voice low but clear, and reached for the box.

Reached again – again – sent fingers scrambling into every pocket. No, no, impossible. Impossible. Her mind understood before her hands did that it _was not there:_ they continued grasping uselessly as Gascoigne’s hulking form raised from his prey and turned to face her. No, she thought again, as she quailed before this thing that looked like her husband: no, I’ve done everything right, everything. It can’t be this one little mistake that undoes me. Everything that came before must count for _something._

She said her husband’s name again, her voice weak this time, and pleading. The pistol was at her hip, but she just stared at him, mouth parted as she willed the magic words to come that would somehow save them both. His lips raised in a snarl. Through the bandages over his eyes she could feel his savage animal stare. Frozen in its power, she felt herself, in a whirling, delirious moment, once again a young bride on her wedding night, shivering in her nightgown and thinking:

_Oh, please, my love, be gentle, please be tender, my darling –_

She had time to get off one shot before he was upon her, and she heard its crash, and saw the blood begin to seep from his wound.

**Author's Note:**

> I feel I should give a shoutout to the podcast "Singing Bones," which I recently started listening to. I think Claire Testoni's musings on "Beauty and the Beast" and the animal bridegroom tale provided a lot of subconscious inspiration for this fic. If you're interested in folktales/fairy tales you should definitely check it out.


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